About “Who Killed It?”

In this cryptic song, Nas describes his search for hip hop’s killer as a noir-era detective. There are multiple meanings to most of the lines, as Nas alludes to hip hop history and provides introspection of who he is as a rapper.

It was all about James Cagney. I got caught up in all his movies—The Roaring Twenties, really all of his gangster movies—and he’s one of my favorite characters of all time, ever. When he did the gangster movies is just the best shit. So I would play around and talk like him in the studio just for fun. We didn’t plan on doing it as a song, but we just did.

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